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Tuesday, October 2, 2018

Exceptional Nation

Greece is an EU internal-colony, and increasingly occupied by the Israeli military, becoming another vulnerable platform to launch Israeli military attacks.

Why is Israel not subject to the regulation and inspection of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of the United Nations?Why is Israel not a party to the nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT).Why is Israel not a party to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)?Why is Israel not a party to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC)?Why is Israel not a party to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC)?Why is Israel allowed to ignore UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 2334 which states that ‘Israel’s Settlements Have No Legal Validity and Constitute a Flagrant Violation of International Law’and which requires the removal of all illegal settlements in the Occupied Territories?

There are, of course, differences in the order of magnitude. Whilst North Korea has maybe 25 nuclear missiles, Israel is estimated to have constructed a nuclear arsenal of up to 400 nuclear warheads – enough to destroy at least the whole of the Middle East and Europe. Furthermore, Israel has refused to be a party to both the Chemical and Biological Weapons Conventions and is therefore not subject – as is the rest of the international community – to official inspection by the OPCW, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. This fact alone means that the Israeli state may well possess an arsenal of chemical WMD in addition to its undeclared nuclear capability.

It is armed and funded by the joint efforts of the Christian and Jewish Zionist Lobby of the US Congress together with the Trump White House but Israel also receives military equipment and assistance from the UK and some other European states such as Germany.Chancellor Angela Merkel has unilaterally altered the balance of power in the region by supplying Netanyahu with a fleet of German-built and subsidised, state-of-the-art submarines reported to have been retro-fitted with cruise-missile nuclear weapons. These undersea war vessels of the Israeli navy are uninspected by the UN or the IAEA and are now assumed to be covertly patrolling the Mediterranean Sea and the Iranian Gulf with their dangerous armaments.We now have the ludicrous position whereby heavily nuclear-armed Israel is accusing non-nuclear Iran of being armed and dangerous in a transparent effort to destroy the Iranian economy.

Iran makes a point after the recent "terrorist" slaughter of Iranian civilians.

It's a huge development in an extremely volatile environment: overnight Sunday Iran launched multiple ballistic missiles toward Syria against targets east of the Euphrates river.Footage released through official state channels show missiles launched by Iran from its Kermanshah region in western Iran towards Syria, targeting ISIS positions east of the Euphrates in revenge for the September 22 attack on a military parade in Ahvaz, which killed 25 and injured scores more.However, the United States will no doubt interpret the action as highly provocative as the US Army maintains bases precisely in the broad region targeted east of the Euphrates in Syria.In the early morning hours of Monday (local time) Iran's elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) published an official statement saying that its Aerospace Division targeted the "headquarters of the terrorists" east of the Euphrates in Syria.

​Jim Rickards explains how the inevitable financial reset may be forced to originate along the Iran-China axis, due to manipulation of $US debt and sanctions. Nobody I have read recently would disagree with this as one of the likely breaking points to start the cascade of the next financial crisis. The Western Financial System clearly needs it to begin "somewhere else", not in New York again.

The U.S. trade war with China and China’s daunting debt problems are well understood by most investors. Coming U.S. sanctions on Iran and Iran’s internal economic problems are also well understood.What is not understood is how these two bilateral confrontations are intimately linked in a three-way tangle that could throw the global economy into complete turmoil and possibly escalate into war. Untangling and understanding these connections is one of the most important tasks for investors today.

Pepe Escobar looks at the EU Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) to conduct oil business with Iran, bypassing $US sanctions, imposed (illegally) through the Belgian SWIFT financial system. The EU has been forced by Trumpian dollar-sanction-hubris to finally take a stand for it's own economic interests, after years of American/NATO abuse. This doorway may need to be widened next year, and the year after that, and...

It’s a game worthy of a Persian chess master: involving energy wars, the balance of power in Southwest Asia, the absolute power of the US-controlled global financial system and the status of the US dollar – bolstered by the petrodollar – as the global reserve currency.

​Empress Angela appears to be very close to being deposed; the closest ever. What will happen to the EU? The inevitable?

​I know the actual situation of dealing with Italian bonds is more complicated than them simply walking away. But, during a banking crisis that threatens everyone’s savings and the solvency of the German banking system, complicated becomes simple really quickly.Italy issues a new currency and offers to pay its debt back in it or nothing at all. Germany screeches. Lawyers go into action. Arms are twisted. Governments fall.Most importantly, capital flees the scene of the chaos.At the end of the day it’s all paper and that paper isn’t worth the legal fees to untangle who owes what to whom anymore. So, if Italy holds its ground a Germany Without a Merkel has no chance of avoiding a complete melt-up in bond yields, which will finally begin the chain of events that leads to a new monetary system and global institutional order.

Over 1 million asylum-seekers came to Europe beginning in 2015, mostly from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, after Angela Merkel opened the country's borders. German conservatives have have levied heavy criticism over the policy, and locals have grown frustrated at spiking crime rates blamed on migrants."So there is a valve for the frustration and anger over the prevailing political style," says media scientist Jo Grobel, adding that as long as the party continues to focus on migration, it can harness Germans' "shared anger."And while Europe's establishment parties are still in control, winning elections - they have given up a lot of ground as populist parties make considerable gains."There is no singular explanation for the strengthening of the extreme right — it is a worldwide phenomenon," says German parliamentarian Konstantin von Notz from the liberal Green Party.

It’s not the military the US aims at this time. The real target is Russian civil aviation, which is on the rise. It’s enough to remember that as soon as Aeroflot Company announced its plans to acquire 100 Superjet SSJ-100 airliners instead of American Boeings, the US Treasury said it was considering the possibility of introducing sanctions against the Russian company Sukhoi, allegedly because its combat planes may have been used in Syrian chemical attacks.A closer look at the blacklist shows the US has sanctioned those who are involved in the production of civilian airliner Irkut MC-21. Aviadvigatel is to supply PD-14 and PD-35 engines, which cannot power combat planes. AeroComposite, a producer of composites, is responsible for the development and creation of the composite wing for the aircraft. The MC-21 will be the world’s first airliner with a capacity of more than 130 passengers to have composite-based wings. The estimated share of composites in the overall design is 40%. So far, the company has produced composite parts only for MC-21 and no other aircraft.

In a big victory for his agenda to shake-up an era of global free trade that many associate with the signing of NAFTA in 1994, President Donald Trump coerced Canada and Mexico to accept more restrictive commerce with their main export partner. ..While the new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) avoids tariffs, it will make it harder for global auto makers to build cars cheaply in Mexico and is aimed at bringing more jobs into the United States...“It’s a good day for Canada,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters after a late-night cabinet meeting to discuss the deal, which triggered a jump in global financial markets...Canada has agreed to provide U.S. dairy farmers access to about 3.5 percent of its approximately $16 billion annual domestic dairy market. Although Canadian sources said its government was prepared to offer compensation, dairy farmers reacted angrily...The deal also requires a higher proportion of the parts in a car to be made in areas of North America paying at least $16 an hour, a rule aimed at shifting jobs from Mexico.Canada and Mexico each agreed to a quota of 2.6 million passenger vehicles exported to the United States in the event that Trump imposes 25 percent global autos tariffs on national security grounds.The quota would allow for significant growth in tariff-free automotive exports from Canada above current production levels of about 2 million units, safeguarding Canadian plants. It is also well above the 1.8 million cars and SUVs Mexico sent north last year.

​What if Facebook and Google didn't own everybody and everything on the internet? Too late?

"For people who want to make sure the Web serves humanity, we have to concern ourselves with what people are building on top of it,” Tim Berners-Lee told Vanity Fair last month. "I was devastated" he said while going through a litany of harmful and dangerous developments of the past three decades of the web.That's why "the Father of the World Wide Web" has launched a start-up that intends to end the dominance of Facebook, Google, and Amazon, while in the process letting individuals take back control of their own data.Berners-Lee's new online platform and company Inrupt is being described as a "personal online data store," or pod, where everything from messages, music, contacts or other personal data will be stored in one place overseen by the user instead of an array of platforms and apps run by corporations seeking to profit off personal information. The project seeks “personal empowerment through data” and aims to "take back" the web, according to company statements.The man who created the world wide web by implementing the first ever successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the internet in 1989 lamented that his creation has been abused by powerful entities for everything mass surveillance to fake news to psychological manipulation to corporations commodifying individuals' information.

​The ​Iranian Ambassador to the UN was ready for Saudi accusations that Iran is a "state sponsor of terrorism" (heh, heh, heh...)

​ The Iranian ambassador supported his case by appealing to a specific WikiLeaks email: “Everybody knows that Saudi Arabia supports terrorism in a very blatant and widespread manner,” he said. In a shock statement before his UN audience, he added, “in the framework of WikiLeaks in 2009, Hillary Clinton is said to have stated that Saudi Arabia is the greatest donor to terrorist groups around the world.”

Interestingly Khoshroo delivered his speech in Arabic, instead of his native Farsi, in order “to make sure that our position is rendered clear” to Riyadh.He was referencing a 2009 intelligence memo released as part of Clinton's emails which said that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide" — though she herself was not the author. The memo continued with "Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for Al-Qaida, the Taliban… and other terrorist groups.”